A year after Sandy, Danbury home still ruined

Robert Miller

Updated 11:21 pm, Saturday, October 26, 2013

Diane Davison walks her property overlooking Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Conn., Wed. Oct. 23, 2013, where her house was destroyed by high winds and falling trees during Hurricane Sandy last year.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

Diane Davison walks her property overlooking Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Conn., Wed. Oct. 23, 2013, where her house was destroyed by high winds and falling trees during Hurricane Sandy last year.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

Diane Davison walks her property overlooking Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Conn., Wed. Oct. 23, 2013, where her house was destroyed by high winds and falling trees during Hurricane Sandy last year.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

Diane Davison walks her property overlooking Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Conn., Wed. Oct. 23, 2013, where her house was destroyed by high winds and falling trees during Hurricane Sandy last year.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

This house overlooking Candlewood Lake near the Pleasant Acres Beach in Danbury was heavily damaged reportedly by falling trees from the high winds of Hurricane Sandy, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

This house overlooking Candlewood Lake near the Pleasant Acres Beach in Danbury was heavily damaged reportedly by falling trees from the high winds of Hurricane Sandy, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

Diane Davison walks her property overlooking Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Conn., Wed. Oct. 23, 2013, where her house was destroyed by high winds and falling trees during Hurricane Sandy last year.
Photo: Carol Kaliff

The third is: Everyone is vulnerable. Preparedness is a necessary thing.

"Find out where the safest room in your house is," she said. "It's so important."

Sandy forced those lessons on Davison. The storm on Oct. 29, 2012, felled a huge oak tree next to her home on Candlewood Lake. The weight of that tree tore away half her house, causing it to collapse.

"The house imploded," she said last week, walking outside her still-ruined home.

Davison wasn't home, but her family -- her daughter Elizabeth Lopez, Elizabeth's husband Ray, and their three children -- were. They escaped safely only because Ray herded his family into the home's lowest, safest floor.

"Ray's from Puerto Rico," Davison said. "He knows about hurricanes."

Although Hurricane Sandy brought more destruction along the shoreline in Connecticut, many houses in greater Danbury were badly damaged, mainly by falling trees, not water.

What's left today -- a year later -- is only a broken ugly chunk of what Davison calls "her dream house." The third floor is gone completely. The second floor is open to the elements -- you can look in and see a staircase leading to nowhere.

Only the first floor -- the place that sheltered her family -- is anything like intact.

The small deck on the lake is fine and last summer's iron lawn furniture is still arranged as if it's ready for people and drinks at dusk. But Davison said she and her family never use it. It's too painful, with that ruin behind them.

Lasting damage, in many ways

Davison bought the home in 1998. She said she worked extra jobs as a saleswoman to help pay for it.

"I put everything I had into it," she said. "I don't have a pension plan. It was my retirement home, my inheritance to my kids."

When Sandy hit, she said, its winds from the south twisted the oak tree around and broke it at its base.

Her family, though safe, was trapped in the first floor by the falling rubble. They were there for 20 minutes before Davison's neighbor, Kevin Kennedy and his son Kyle, rushed to the dangerous building with ladders and ropes and got them out.

"They are real-life heros," Davison said.

The house was so badly damaged that nothing could be salvaged.

"We had the clothes on our back," Davison said. "We had nothing else. No clothes. No food. No pots and pans."

"When I first called, they said `Lady, you and 5,000 other people,' " Davison said. "When they finally looked at it, they said `You were right.' "

Danbury builder Alan Aragi got the tree and most of the house cleared away in early 2013. It was a job some builders shied away from because of the difficulty of dismantling the combination of the huge tree and collapsed building.

"It took 10 Dumpsters," the owner said.

Davison then learned the fallen tree had damaged her home's septic system. That had to be fixed. She had to have an architectural engineer confirm that the home's foundation was still structurally sound. All this has taken time and money.

Right now, she's engaged in trying to get the city of Danbury to reduce the assessment on her property because of the damage.

Her argument is this: because of revaluation, she's now paying $3,640 a year more in taxes on her property, despite the fact that her house is a ruin.

State statutes allow municipalities to lower the assessment of real estate "upon removal of damaged buildings."

But Davison's real gripe is that the city has increased its assessment of her property to $407,600 for less than one-third of an acre, compared to the previous assessment of about $190,000, she said.

She got a letter telling her of the revaluation two weeks after Sandy. Her attempts to get it changed by the city's Board of Tax Appeals have not been successful.

Davison said she's compared her assessment to a neighbor who has 0.74 acres of fairly flat land and 100 feet of lake shore front -- her property consists mostly of a steep rocky hill. The neighbor's land, she said, is assessed for $371,800.

"He has three times the land I have," she said.

Tax assessor Colleen LaHood was unavailable for comment last week on the situation.

But Mayor Mark Boughton said the city did lower the assessment on Davison's house from $83,000 to $23,000 because of the storm damage.

The problem, he said, is that because of the value of Davison's land, the cut in her home's assessment won't alter her tax bill that much.

Boughton said the company that did the city's re-evaluation looked at the price of city property comprehensively.